Granted, the retracement following the wedge breakout high at 2,212 yesterday has been more aggressive than we might like to see, as it didn’t go far before hitting strong resistance. Nevertheless, what happens next will be key. A 78.6% Fibonacci level is generally a maximum retracement expected before signs of failure. And when the chance for a continuation of the retracement beyond the prior swing low increases.
Weekly Chart is a Concern
Of concern is the weekly chart. Natural gas is on track to end the week in a bearish position. It will form a bearish shooting star candlestick pattern this week, barring an end of day rally. For next week it will provide a bearish setup in that time frame. A drop below this week’s low 2,212 triggers the setup. Of course, if that happens the bull wedge breakout on the daily chart will have failed to follow through.
On the Upside
On the upside, a bullish reversal signal is provided on the daily chart on a rally above today’s high of 2,186. There is a chance for a sharp rally given the rapid price advance that was seen prior to the wedge formation. The current advance would match the prior at a minimum of 2,320. Note that only the high momentum portion of the previous move is being used, starting from the March 1 daily low. Also of interest is the slightly lower target from a rising ABCD pattern. Symmetry between the CD and AB legs of the trend pattern occurs at a target of 2,298.
For a look at all of today’s economic events, check out our economic calendar.
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Shiba Inu paints a higher high on charts, signaling a potential reversal in investor sentiment and market dynamics. Following a period of consolidation, SHIB has broken past previous resistance levels.
SHIB’s price has overcome a critical resistance level, now turning it into a support that traders should keep an eye on. This newfound support is situated around the $0.000022 mark. Should SHIB’s price retrace, this level could play a crucial role in sustaining the current bullish momentum. On the flip side, resistance lies near the $0.000028 level, a breach of which could pave the way for further gains.
Shiba Inu has recently climbed to a new high, which is quite important. This shows that people are willing to buy more even when prices dip, suggesting they believe in the reversal in the foreseeable future. Before this, SHIB’s price was consolidating, so this upward move has made those who like SHIB hopeful that its value could keep rising.
XRP secures golden cross
XRP has unexpectedly secured the golden cross formation. This occurs when a shorter-term moving average crosses over a longer-term moving average, typically indicating potential for significant price increases.
The daily price chart has shown the 50-day moving average climbing above the 200-day moving average, a substantial growth signal. The golden cross could potentially lead to an uptrend as it may attract more buying pressure.
The recent dip to the support level around $0.50 was met with a strong buy-back, pushing the price to a higher high. As another higher high gets painted, XRP might finally enter a prolonged uptrend and reverse for good.
In terms of growth scenarios, XRP could test and possibly break through the aforementioned resistance level. This would open the way to $0.70, and consolidation at around that price level would become a foundation for growth toward $1.
While the golden cross formation has historically been a reliable indicator of growth, it is not a guaranteed predictor of future price movements.
Bitcoin’s hidden pattern
Bitcoin gives us something to talk about as the charts hint at a hidden pattern that could mean good news for investors. On the four-hour chart, an inverted head and shoulders pattern has formed, and this is often seen as a positive sign.
Looking closely at the numbers, Bitcoin has shown us a bottom, known as the “head,” at around $62,430, which is a key level for Bitcoin. After that, it went up and came back down to form the “shoulders” at around $68,000, but not as low as the head. This is important because it shows that Bitcoin does not want to go lower than that head level.
What is exciting is that Bitcoin is now moving upwards, making what we call a “higher high.” The price to watch is $64,433, because if Bitcoin can get past this point and stay there, it could herald the start of a big move upwards.
If we imagine the future for a bit, a growth scenario would be Bitcoin breaking past that $68,000 level. If it can hold its ground above that, the next stop could be looking toward $69,000, which would be a new challenge for Bitcoin to beat.
But remember, Bitcoin can be unpredictable, especially after a severe correction like the last one we saw on the chart. The unexpected drop from $70,000 clearly became a reason for speculation about the future of this rally and the potential the digital gold can show in 2024. Recently, top-tier analysts at Bernstein set the target price level for Bitcoin at $90,000 by the end of the year.
A memecoin frenzy on Base, an Ethereum layer 2 network, was jump-started by the recent Etherum Dencun upgrade, which lowered transaction fees.
A group turned $1,824 into over $2.1 million by trading memecoin NORMIE on Base.
Due to liquidity constraints, the group must sell its holdings gradually to avoid crashing the token’s market price, even though the traders hold only about 2.2% of its total supply.
One group of wallets on Base, the Ethereum layer 2 network incubated by centralised exchange Coinbase, has turned $1,824 into over $2.1 million amid the memecoin trading frenzy.
The holders, however, can’t cash in all of their chips at once because of the small size of the coin’s liquidity pool.
The story starts with the Ethereum Dencun upgrade, an upgrade on the Ethereum blockchain that went live on March 13 and that caused transaction fees on layer 2 blockchains to drop by as much as 98%.
With the lower fees, traders rushed to Base, as the platform had an all-time high of 855,191 active users on March 16.
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The total daily volume generated on Base hit an all-time high of $394 million on March 19, with a majority of the volume coming from memecoin traders, who tend to be price sensitive and who therefore were drawn in by the drastically lower transaction fees
One memecoin in particular, NORMIE, which is branded toward “normies,” or individuals entering crypto for the first time, rose 71,089% from its launch on March 6 to its peak on March 16.
On the day of its launch, wallet address 0xb3, received 0.299 Ether from a centralised exchange.
That wallet went on to send 0.1 Ether to wallet addresses, 0x6b and 0x57. All three of these wallets then purchased NORMIE on March 6 while the price per NORMIE was around $0.00007.
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Collectively, the three wallets purchased 24.4 million NORMIE, or 2.4% of the total supply, across 11 transactions.
A fourth wallet, 0x45, which was also funded from a centralised exchange on March 6, is connected to wallet 0x6b because they sent 0.01 Ether to them on March 9.
The wallet had similar transaction history, purchasing 5.5 million NORMIE with three transactions from March 6 to March 9.
It is unknown whether this cluster of wallets is one individual or an entity.
So far, these wallets have sold a total of 2.4 million NORMIE, or around $59,000. They still hold about 22 million NORMIE, or $2.1 million.
The group, or individual, controlling these wallets cannot offload their entire NORMIE holdings in one go because the liquidity pools for the token have only about $2.2 million.
A sudden, large-scale sale would likely crash NORMIE’s market price. Consequently, it appears the holders are adopting a strategy of gradually selling their tokens to avoid drastically affecting the token’s value.
The major US indices are closing with mixed results today. The Dow industrial average and S&P index both closed lower. No record closes for those indices on the last trading day of the week. The NASDAQ index did close in positive territory and at a new record.
A summary of the closing levels shows:
Dow industrial average -305.49 points for -0.77% at 39475.91
S&P index-7.37.4 -0.14% at 5234.17
NASDAQ index rose 26.97 points or 0.16% at 16428.81.
The small-cap Russell 2012-26.56 points or -1.27% at 2071.99.
For the trading week, the major indices (and the Russell 2000) all closed higher:
Dow industrial average rose 1.602%
S&P index rose 2.29%, its best week since December.
NASDAQ index rose 2.85%, its best week since January 8 week
Russell 2000 rose 1.60%.
The NASDAQ and S&P indices has only had four down trading weeks in 2024. For the trading year:
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Welcome to Finance Redefined, your weekly dose of essential decentralized finance (DeFi) insights — a newsletter crafted to bring you the most significant developments from the past week.
The memecoin frenzy has helped Solana-based decentralized exchanges (DEX) top the charts in trading volume, overtaking their Ethereum counterparts. Some tokens eclipsed Ethereum-based memecoins in trading volume on DEXs just hours after launching.
In more memecoin news, the Milady nonfungible token (NFT) collection joined the memecoin rush by launching its own token, which reached $18.6 million within two hours of its presale announcement.
ParaSwap narrowly evaded a hack by pausing its Augustus v6 contract application programming interface, or API, after discovering a vulnerability. The protocol secured the potential victims’ funds through a white hat intervention.
In other news, the price of Ether ETHUSD has fallen 18% in the past week after touching a new all-time high above $4,000. If the price falls to $3,100, $212 million worth of positions are at risk of liquidation.
Solana activity flips Ethereum amid memecoin craze, even as txs fail
Solana network activity surpassed Ethereum over the weekend amid a scramble for Solana-based memecoins — causing the network to struggle to keep up.
On March 16, Solana’s total trading volume soared past Ethereum, reaching $3.52 billion, beating out the daily volume on the Ethereum network by more than $1.1 billion, according to DefiLlama.
Continue reading
Milady NFT memecoin reaches $18.6 million presale goal in less than two hours
NFT collection Milady’s novel Solana memecoin has attracted 91,486 SOL ($18.6 million) within two hours of its presale announcement.
On March 18, Milady revealed the Solana-based memecoin, Milady Wif Hat, which is named after the popular Solana memecoin Dogwifhat (WIF). It will have a minimum investment of 1 SOL SOLUSD, with an 88,888 SOL cap.
Hours later, the presale had been oversubscribed. “Milady Wif Hat presale has soared to its limit of 88,888 SOL and is now closed,” wrote the team, adding: “Any additional Solana raised will have 100% of their funds returned.”
Continue reading
ParaSwap evades hack targeting Augustus v6 contract vulnerability
DeFi aggregator ParaSwap discovered a vulnerability in its newly launched Augustus v6 contract and prevented a colossal loss of funds through timely white hat intervention.
On March 18, the ParaSwap Augustus v6 contract went live, which aimed to improve swapping efficiency and reduce gas fees. However, the contract contained a critical vulnerability, allowing hackers to drain funds when approved.
Continue reading
Ether at $3,100 could liquidate $212 million worth of leveraged long positions
The cryptocurrency market could see over $212 million of leveraged long positions liquidated if the Ether price falls below the $3,100 mark.
Ether dropped 9.3% to $3,254 in the 24 hours leading up to 10:40 am UTC on March 19. Ether is down over 18% on the weekly chart, and falling to $3,100 would wipe over $212 million worth of long leverage, according to Coinglass data.
Continue reading
DeFi market overview
Data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView shows that DeFi’s top 100 tokens by market capitalization had a bearish week, with most trading in the red on the weekly charts. The total value locked in DeFi protocols dipped below $100 billion.
Cointelegraph
Thanks for reading our summary of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us next Friday for more stories, insights and education regarding this dynamically advancing space.
Robert Mitchnick, head of digital assets at BlackRock, has revealed that the clients of the financial behemoth are showing “little” interest in Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
At the same time, there is “very little interest everywhere else,” which implies that the investment company is not even considering smaller coins.
Mitchnick has acknowledged that the cryptocurrency community wants to see the financial giant exploring more options, but he says that BlackRock remains mainly focused on Bitcoin.
Bitcoin, according to the executive, is “overwhelmingly the number one priority.”
Recently, BlackRock joined the tokenization race by launching a new fund based on the Ethereum network. The fund, which was officially launched earlier this week, makes it possible to earn US dollar yields with the help of blockchain technology.
In November, BlackRock also filed to launch an Ethereum exchange-traded fund. However, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission further postponed its decision on this application earlier this March.
As reported by U.Today, the odds of an Ethereum ETF being approved collapsed due to regulatory pressure.
A week ago, Senators Jack Reed and Laphonza Butler specifically asked SEC Chair Gary Gensler not to approve ETFs for more cryptocurrency tokens.
At the same time, the SEC has reportedly launched an aggressive campaign to label Ether as a security, which further diminishes the likelihood of an Ether-based spot ETF being approved in the near future.
There was a shooting ongoing at the Crocus City Hall, a music venue in Moscow. At least three gunmen were killing people. There are videos of it circulating online.
The U.S. embassy in Russia warned that ‘extremists’ had imminent plans for an attack in Moscow, hours after Russian security services said they had foiled a planned shooting at a synagogue by a cell from the Afghan arm of Islamic State.”
This article was written by Adam Button at www.forexlive.com.
A new report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) explores the impact of decentralized finance (DeFi) in the ASEAN region. On the one hand, there is little current evidence of a DeFi financial inclusion impact. That’s because DeFi is dominated by professional and institutional investors. It also found that retail investors bore the brunt of the crypto fallout. However, despite its concerns over the current unregulated nature of activities, it sees potential if regulated institutions adopt tokenization, DLT and other DeFi features.
Professionals dominate DeFi
A major takeaway from the report was the analysis of the types of active investors in the decentralized finance markets. It categorized activity based on trade size, with retail transactions counting as anything below $10,000. In terms of dollar volumes (rather than transaction numbers) institutional (transactions > $1 million) and professional investors ($10k-$1m) dominate across the globe.
This was reinforced by data on trade sizes split into centralized(CEX) versus decentralized exchanges (DEX). Centralized exchanges predominantly serve retail users and have significantly smaller transaction sizes, typically less than $1,000 but averaging $1,000 – $4,000. In contrast, the Curve DEX had average transactions of around $200,000 for an extended period in 2023, with Uniswap V3 averaging around $95,000.
“Using transaction sizes as a proxy, it can be inferred that more than 2/3 of global crypto-asset activity is performed by professional and/or institutional investors in every region analysed, and the share of professional activity as a part of total crypto-asset volume is the highest in East Asia,” the report finds.
Hence, the OECD is making the point that retail makes up a relatively small proportion of the total dollar trades. However, in an unregulated environment, following the collapse of centralized exchanges and lenders, consumers were the ones to lose the most. Plus, if a user wants to host their own coins and participate in DeFi, the current usability of DeFi is below par. It ponders whether self custody rules out DeFi for retail users, particularly the underbanked.
ASEAN crypto adoption
Part of the report explores the takeup of crypto in specific countries. Between 2020 and 2022, Thailand experienced the largest flows per capita, followed by Malaysia and Vietnam. In absolute terms, Vietnam had the most significant flows, with Thailand and Singapore next.
The OECD warns that unregulated crypto activity not only exposes consumers to losses but also presents financial stability risks for some economies.
At the same time, it points to the potential for tokenization to bring efficiency and productivity gains to capital markets. It highlighted two initiatives in the region where DeFi has been explored, including Project Mariana and Project Guardian.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore started Project Guardian in 2022 in collaboration with JP Morgan Onyx, DBS and SBI Digital Asset Holdings, which are trialing DeFi on public blockchain. It subsequently significantly expanded the initiative last year. In addition to numerous new use cases, regulators from England, Switzerland, and Japan have also joined.
Despite Friday’s dip, the week paints a brighter picture: the S&P 500 is poised for a 2.2% rise, the Nasdaq for a 2.5% increase, and the Dow tops the list with a 2.3% gain.
Federal Reserve’s Stance and Market Impact
The week’s optimism is partly attributed to the Federal Reserve’s decision to maintain current interest rates, with Chair Jerome Powell signaling potential rate cuts ahead. This stance helped alleviate investor concerns over recent high inflation figures, boosting market confidence.
Individual Stock Highlights
In individual stock movements, FedEx reported a more than 8% increase after surpassing earnings expectations. Contrastingly, Nike experienced an 8.2% fall following disappointing future guidance and slowed sales in China. Lululemon Athletica faced an 18.6% drop, its most significant decline since March 2020, due to unimpressive guidance and decelerating growth in North America.
Market Outlook
Concluding the week, the market indicates a bullish outlook in the short term, despite Friday’s pullback. The anticipation of easing Federal Reserve policies and robust earnings reports from companies like FedEx bolster market confidence.
This positive sentiment overshadows the sector-specific concerns such as those in consumer discretionary and technology. Investors should stay attentive to central bank updates, which will continue to play a crucial role in shaping market direction in the upcoming period.
With a general market rebound for the week and supportive economic signals, the short-term view leans towards continued market strength.
:quality(70)/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/dlnews/DZE365SGOZE6LEFZTIB3MQKQ5M.jpg "This group owns just 2.2% of a memecoin on Base, but if it sold, the coin would crash. – DL News")
